Chinese Whispers tct-6

by Peter May

  Li glanced out of the passenger window as they passed the side entrance to the Ministry compound in Zhengyi Road. His apartment was less than two hundred metres beyond the wall. A taxi was pulled in at the kerbside, and the driver was helping his father out on to the sidewalk.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. Mister Li senior was going to visit his grandson. And Li knew that Margaret would not be surprised that Li had failed to turn up. Again. A part of him wanted to ask Wu to stop, so that he could get out and explain. But there was no point. An excuse, even a good one, always sounded like an excuse.

  Ironically, the EMS post office was just around the corner at No. 7 Qianmen Da Jie. It was a huge, twelve-storey building that took up half the block. Rows of distinctive green EMS vans were parked out front, in a narrow carpark screened from the road by trees. Wu parked right outside the main door, waving aside protests from a security man by pushing a Ministry ID in his face. Li stepped out and saw, in the afternoon sunshine, the row of red flags lining the roof of police headquarters on the next half of the block. Wu lit a cigarette. ‘Cheeky bastard. Posting the thing to us from right outside HQ. Like he’s thumbing his nose at us. How was it he signed his note? Catch me if you can?’

  Li said grimly. ‘We’ll catch him alright.’ But in his heart he wondered how many more young women would have to die before they did.

  The main hall was busy, queues forming at windows along a counter which ran the length of it. Lights reflected off a marble floor, and voices off marble-faced walls. One counter sold nothing but paper, string, tape and glue, and Li wondered if perhaps their killer had wrapped his parcel in the post office itself. He looked along the counters as if he hoped that maybe the murderer’s ghost might still be there, some impression, some presence that he had left behind, even just in the memory of one of tellers.

  They made themselves known to security and were taken to the manager’s office. Wu nudged Li and nodded towards a copy of the Beijing Youth Daily lying on his desk. The manager was a dapper man in a dark suit, with a collar and tie. He looked at them warily through steel-framed spectacles and offered them tea. Li declined. He showed the manager a colour photocopy of the parcel label, with its stamps and postmark. He said, ‘One of your tellers took a parcel with this address across his or her counter at twelve-thirty yesterday. He or she stamped it and franked it and put it in the mail basket.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, I believe that teller is the only person we know of who has set eyes on the Beijing Ripper.’

  He had calculated that his use of the term would have some effect. And he was not wrong. The manager’s eyes opened wide and flickered briefly towards the newspaper lying on his desk. ‘He was here?’

  ‘We believe so.’

  Li could see the thoughts processing behind the manager’s eyes as clearly as if they were windows. ‘We have thousands of people in here every day,’ he said. ‘I think it’s unlikely that a teller would remember any one of them in particular.’

  Wu was looking at a small black and white television screen mounted high on the wall in the far corner of the office. It showed a view looking down on the main hall of the post office. His jaw froze, mid-chew. ‘You guys got closed-circuit TV in here?’

  The manager glanced towards the screen, the implications of Wu’s question dawning on them all simultaneously. ‘We have two cameras,’ he said. ‘One on each side of the hall.’

  ‘And do you record what they see?’ Li asked, hardly daring to believe that they might actually have the killer on video.

  ‘We recycle the tapes every seven days.’

  ‘We only need to go back one,’ Wu said, his eyes shining with sudden optimism.

  * * *

  The recording equipment was in the office of the head of security. He removed his grey-peaked cap and scratched his head. ‘Sure,’ he said in answer to Li’s question. ‘The tapes are all time-coded, so we can find the time you want pretty fast.’

  ‘Let’s do it, then,’ Wu said.

  The security man rummaged in a cupboard and pulled out a VHS tape and put it in an empty machine. He flicked the play switch and then began fast rewinding from the end of it. It went backwards from seven p.m. Li watched the speeded-up comings and goings, like an old Chaplin movie gone mad, with a growing sense of disappointment. He glanced at the other two monitors displaying live pictures from the main hall. He said to the manager. ‘And those are your only two camera positions?’

  The manager nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘They’re too high for us to see faces. We’re really only getting the tops of heads.’

  The managed shrugged. ‘They weren’t designed to pick out faces, just to give us an overview.’

  Li felt fingers of frustration choking back his brief optimism. It would be ironic if they managed to catch their killer on tape, but not be able to see his face.

  The time-code on the tape was counting back at high speed. The picture was just a blur. Wu said, ‘Stop it at twelve-fifteen. We’ll watch it from there.’ He shoved another piece of gum in his mouth and lit another cigarette.

  The tape ran back a little past twelve-fifteen before the security man could stop it. The picture cleared and they had a view of the hall from the left-hand camera. It was running forward now from twelve-thirteen and fifty-three seconds. Li said, ‘Can you cue up the tape from the other camera while we’re watching this?’ The security man nodded. He found the right tape and set it rewinding in another machine.

  The others watched a constant stream of activity on the first monitor. A woman with a pushchair. A bunch of schoolgirls posting some letters. Businessmen with express mail. Ordinary folk going about their ordinary business. The main floor was busy, at least thirty people moving around it at any one time. Maybe more. The picture definition was not good, as if the camera had viewed proceedings through gauze stretched across its lens. Suddenly, Wu shouted, ‘There!’ And he stabbed his finger at the screen.

  Li leaned in and saw a figure in a long, dark coat with a shoebox parcel under his arm walking through the sunshine that spilled in from the main door. ‘Shit!’ he muttered under his breath. ‘He’s wearing a baseball cap. He knows about the cameras.’ His face was completely masked by the long peak of the black cap, and plunged into shadow by it. His collar was turned up, and they could not even tell if his hair was long or short. He wore gloves, dark trousers, black shoes. There was not one centimetre of him on view.

  Wu was shaking his head. ‘He’s playing with us, Chief. He knew we would see these tapes. He knew how fucking frustrated we would be when we had him right there in our sights and still couldn’t see him. He’s like the invisible fucking man.’

  They watched as he stood for some time in the centre of the concourse, as if deciding which queue to join. Then he walked to a window at the far end, almost immediately below the other camera. Its view of him would be hopelessly distorted, and he was about as far as he could get from the camera whose shot they were watching now. He conducted his business with a teller they could not see. After a brief exchange, the window was lifted and his parcel taken across the counter. He waited until it had been weighed and costed, and then took a wallet from his coat pocket and paid in cash. He never once looked around, his face hidden from view at every moment. He turned and walked briskly to the door and was gone.

  Li turned to the manager. ‘Find out who that teller was and get them in here now.’

  The teller turned out to be a plump, middle-aged woman with an attitude. She had done nothing wrong, and as far as she was concerned, she was going to be as unhelpful as possible. They replayed the tape for her and she watched with a bored expression.

  ‘So what am I supposed to be?’ she asked. ‘Madam Memory? I don’t even look at their faces. It’s bad enough that I can smell their breath through the grilles in the window.’

  ‘It was an unusual address,’ Wu said.

  ‘I don’t look at the addresses. I weigh the parcel, I look at the postcode, I get a price. I stam
p it, they pay. They go, then it’s who’s next.’

  ‘You’re not being very helpful, lady,’ Wu said.

  ‘I’m not paid to be helpful,’ she snapped. ‘I’m paid to do a job. I do it. I’ve done if for years. If anyone’s got any complaint about my work, that’s another matter.’ She looked defiantly around the faces. ‘Is anyone complaining about my work?’

  Li said very quietly. ‘Do you have any idea what was in that parcel?’

  ‘Of course I don’t. What’s it to me what was in the parcel?’

  ‘Well,’ Li said patiently, ‘it might help you to understand just how much danger you are in.’

  For the first time, there was no quick comeback and she visibly blanched. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I think it would be helpful if I explained,’ Li said, ‘that the parcel you took from that gentleman contained the kidney of a woman he hacked to death on Sunday.’ Her eyes widened. ‘You might even have heard of him. He was in the paper this morning. They’re calling him the Beijing Ripper.’ There was the smallest intake of breath, and her hand went to her mouth. ‘Did you see that story by any chance?’ She nodded, unable to speak now. ‘Well, you’re the only person we know of who has seen him.’ Her eyes grew wider still. ‘And if we know you’ve seen him, he knows you’ve seen him. So I don’t really think I’d like to be in your shoes tomorrow when he reads that we have interviewed a witness, a teller at the EMS post office, who took a parcel from him on Monday.’

  ‘You wouldn’t put that in the paper!’ she gasped.

  Li shrugged sympathetically. ‘Maybe we won’t have to. Maybe we’ll catch him by then. But we’re going to need some help. We’re going to need a description. Anything at all you can remember. Anything.’ He paused. ‘It could be the most important thing you’ve ever had to do in your life.’

  She asked to see the tape again. Then they played her the second tape, but half of the killer was outside the bottom frame of the picture, and they were looking directly down on top of him. There was not so much as a hair on view.

  The teller was babbling nervously now. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. His face was shaded by that cap. And really, I don’t look at them, I don’t.’

  ‘Anything you can remember,’ Li said again. ‘Was he tall, short? Was he clean shaven? Did he wear glasses …?’

  ‘Yes,’ the teller broke in eagerly. ‘He had glasses. I remember that. Like sunglasses, only not as dark. You know, like they react to the sunlight, but the lenses never go really black.’

  ‘Do you remember what kind of glasses?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Think. Did they have heavy frames? Or were they silver or gold? Steel frames like your boss?’

  She glanced at the manager who scowled silently at her. She shook her head. ‘No. No, I don’t remember. But he was clean shaven. I’m pretty sure about that. I would have noticed if he had whiskers.’

  ‘What about his accent?’ Li said. ‘Was there anything unusual about his voice?’

  He could see the concentration on her face. There was nothing that concentrated the mind so well as fear, and the instinct for self-preservation. But to her own and their frustration, she genuinely could not remember.

  Li looked at the monitor. He was right there in front of them. Li could reach out and touch the screen. But they were no nearer to catching him than before. He was taunting, torturing them, of that Li was certain. He plotted and planned his every move, anticipating what they would do at every stage so that he was always one step ahead of them.

  ‘We’ll need both those tapes,’ Wu said to the head of security, and the security man punched a button and the picture froze on the screen. Li had a sudden inspiration.

  ‘Take a statement from the teller,’ he said to Wu, and turned to the manager. ‘I want you to come down to the floor with me. And I’ll need a tape measure. I want to take a few measurements.’

  III

  It had been an awkward half hour. Both Margaret and Li’s father had paid lip service to the thought that Li might turn up any at moment. But neither really believed it. The old man had sat in the apartment with his coat and hat on, a fur hat with fold-up earmuffs pulled down over thin, grey hair, his gloves folded neatly on his knees. He had spent all of five minutes half-heartedly bouncing Li Jon on them before becoming bored with the child and handing him back to Margaret. He had accepted an offer of tea, taken two sips and then left it to grow cold on a low table beside the settee.

  Margaret knew that he disapproved of her. That he would have preferred a Chinese girl to have been the mother of his grandson. Just one more grudge to bear his son. And so she had made no attempt to engage him in conversation. Neither of them considered it worth making the effort.

  Finally she stood up. ‘Normally I take Li Jon out for a walk at this time. In his buggy. You’re welcome to join us if you want. Or you can wait here in case Li Yan arrives.’ She was determined not to sit on in this atmosphere. To her disappointment he stood up, almost eagerly, clutching his gloves.

  ‘I will come with you.’

  A girl carved in pewter played a Chinese zither. Another, chiselled from white marble, sat reading a book in the dappled shade of the trees. There were occasional small squares set off the path through the gardens which separated the two sides of Zhengyi Road. Old men in baseball caps sat smoking on the benches that lined them. An old woman in a quilted purple jacket sat gazing into space, her bobbed hair the colour of brushed steel. Couples strolled arm in arm, mothers with children, school kids with pink jackets and jogpants.

  Margaret pushed Li’s buggy north at a leisurely rate, wind rustling the leaves overhead. The buggy was blue, punctuated by the odd coloured square, and had small yellow wheels. There was a support for his feet, and a plastic tray in front of him for toys. A hood, folded away now, could extend from back to front if it rained. A bag which hung from the back of the pushbar, and a tray under the seat, held extra clothes and toys and a flask of warm milk if it was needed. This was a walk she had taken often in the last few months. An escape from the apartment, and in the cold autumn air a chance to breathe again after the suffocating heat of the summer. But now she resented the silent presence of Li’s father as they headed towards the traffic on Changan Avenue.

  ‘Why do you bother?’ she said eventually and turned to look at him.

  He kept his eyes straight ahead. He was not a stupid man. He knew what she meant. ‘Because he is family,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Margaret said. ‘He’s your son. And yet you treat him as if somehow everything bad that’s ever happened in your life is his fault.’

  ‘He must bear responsibility for his shortcomings. He has been less than diligent in his filial responsibilities.’

  ‘And maybe you haven’t been such a good father.’ He flicked her a glance. ‘You were so obsessed with the loss of your wife, you forgot that your son had lost his mother. If ever a boy needed his father, it was then. But, no, you couldn’t see past yourself, past your own hurt. You couldn’t reach out to a kid who was hurting just as badly, maybe worse.’

  ‘What would you know about it?’ he said defensively.

  ‘I know what Li has told me. What happened, what he felt. Things he probably hasn’t told another living being. Certainly not you. And I know that the Cultural Revolution wasn’t his fault. That it wasn’t his fault his mother was persecuted for being an intellectual. He didn’t invent the Red Guards. He wasn’t even old enough to be one.’

  ‘You know nothing of these things. You are an American.’

  ‘I’m an American who has spent most of the last five years in China. I have talked to a lot of people, listened to their stories, read a great many books. In fact,’ she added bitterly, ‘I haven’t had much else to do with my life this last year, raising your grandson. I think I know a little about what the Cultural Revolution was, what it meant to those who survived it. And those who didn’t.’

  The old man held his own counsel for several minutes
as they reached the top of the road and turned west towards the ramp to the underground walkway. As they passed into the darkness of the tunnel beneath Changan Avenue he said, ‘In China we treasure a son, because it is his duty to look after us in our old age. He and his wife, and their children, will look after his parents when they can no longer look after themselves.’ His voice echoed back at them off the roof and the walls.

  ‘Yeah,’ Margaret said unsympathetically. ‘That’s why the orphanages are full of little girls, dumped by their parents, abandoned on doorsteps. Great system.’

  ‘I did not invent the One Child Policy,’ Li’s father said bitterly. ‘I only thank God I had a daughter before they thought of it. She, at least, has taken her responsibility to her father seriously.’

  Margaret forced herself to remain silent. Xiao Ling, she knew, had been anything but the dutiful daughter.

  ‘But Li Yan? The moment he is old enough, he is off to Beijing to live with his Uncle Yifu and train to be the great policeman. Never a second thought for the family he left behind in Sichuan.’

  They emerged into the bright sunlight on the north side of Changan, and a shady path led off towards Tiananmen, the trees that hid it from the road casting their long shadows against the high red wall that bounded the gardens outside the Forbidden City. Margaret bumped the buggy into Nanheyan Street and swung hard left into the gardens. Anger forced her to break her silence.

  ‘That’s what really sticks in your craw, isn’t it? That he came to live with his Uncle Yifu. Your brother. Who was more of a father to him than you ever were.’ She barely stopped to draw breath. ‘And don’t give me that crap about how Li Yan was responsible for his uncle’s death. We both know that isn’t true. Even if he still feels guilty about it. But you never fail to play the guilt card, do you. Never miss a chance to turn the knife in all his emotional wounds. Because you know it works every time. I think you must take pleasure in his pain.’